Bleeding Kansas refers to the hostilities that broke out in the Kansas Territory in the 1850’s during the lead-up to its admission as a state. Up to that point, a delicate balance had been struck in the senate between free states and slave states, giving the two sides roughly equal power and preventing any truly drastic measures to be taken by either side. This was highlighted by the Missouri Compromise of 1850, only a few years before, which had two parts: 1) Missouri was admitted as a slave state, while Maine was admitted at the same time to counteract this and retain the balance in the Senate; and 2) Slavery was excluded from territory north of parallel 36°30′ north (with the state of Missouri itself, though above this line, grandfathered in as a slave state).
This did not, however, solve the problem, as Bleeding Kansas demonstrates. Indeed, it instead lead to a charged ideological war, with three sides fighting: Free-Staters, abolitionlists, and the pro-slavery element. These groups all had different aims.
The pro-slavery element is probably easiest to describe, since it is the most distinct of the three groups. This group wanted Kansas to be admitted to the Union as a slave state to disrupt the balance of power in favor of slavery and its continued expansion. Many of its participants were easily able to cross the border from their homes in Missouri and influence elections at will. They would also contribute to the violence by kidnapping and murdering (all three groups participated in these activities to some extent, though). Motivating factors on a local level included the suitability of parts of Kansas along the Missouri river for slave operations, as well as a fear of Missouri being influenced by becoming surrounded on three sides by free states, giving escaped slaves more havens in the area.
The abolitionists also had a fairly clear-cut goal; in short, they wanted to abolish slavery everywhere, and wanted to use Bleeding Kansas to generate outrage at pro-slavery elements and their behaviors. However noble these goals, it probably did not help their case very much that the most notorious abolitionist to emerge from Bleeding Kansas was John Brown, personally responsible for many murders of pro-slavery elements within the territory, and a proponent of using terrorist-like actions to further the cause (as he would prove in his final act against the U.S. Military at Harper’s Ferry shortly after leaving Kansas.
The last group was the Free Staters. The abolitionists could partly be considered a subset of the Free Staters, as the unifying goal of all Free-Staters was to admit Kansas as a free state, but not all Free-Staters were abolitionists. Their unifying goal was to keep slavery out of Kansas and have it admitted to the Union as a free state, a goal which was finally achieved on January 29th, 1861.
The aggression in Bleeding Kansas intensified tension between slave states and free states. Indeed, its admission as a free state came only a few short weeks after Abraham Lincoln’s election as President and South Carolina’s secession from the Union. John Brown’s actions within Kansas apparently convinced him of the futility of small-scale moves, and inspired him to take control of the arsenal in Harper’s Ferry in an event that would contribute to mistrust on both sides leading up to the Civil War. Bleeding Kansas began the open, physical violence between the two sides which would eventually lead to the war beginning at Fort Sumter in April 1861.
Works cited:
National Parks Service: Fort Scott National Historic Site. “Bleeding Kansas”. Web. Retrieved from http://www.nps.gov/resources/story.htm?id=193 on 3/14/2013.
PBS. “Bleeding Kansas”. Africans in America Resource Bank. Web. Retrieved from
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/aia/part4/4p2952.html on 3/14/2013.
Kansas Historical Society and the Kansas Historical Foundation. “Bleeding Kansas”. Kansaspedia. Web. Retrieved from
http://www.kshs.org/kansapedia/bleeding-kansas/15145 on 3/14/2013.
